IN MARCH I visited Leipzig, the city for ever associated with the music of Bach, who composed there for the last 27 years of his life. I enjoyed an uplifting Saturday concert by the renowned Thomas Choir in a packed St Thomas Church, a reminder of the important place that music still holds in the German Lutheran tradition.

By contrast that same morning I had been shown a very different place, the Stasi Museum, a museum devoted to the activities of the notorious secret police of the former East Germany. It is a monument to a state apparatus of spying, by all kinds of sophisticated and unsophisticated devices, dedicated to the maintenance of political control and domination.

This museum did not, however, simply bear witness to the ingenuity of spying devices; it also reflected what Cranmer’s Prayer Book confession calls the “manifold sins and wickedness” that stem from our following “the devices and desires of our own hearts”.

If there was one overriding theme to which this museum pointed, it was betrayal. The Stasi recruited huge numbers of men and women to spy on their neighbours, and although it is possible, now that the East German regime is no more, for people to discover what the Stasi knew about them, and who had reported on them, by no means all wish to know. To discover that you have been betrayed by members of your family, your friends, your neighbours, your teachers or your pupils — whoever it may be — is deeply undermining.

Human life depends on trust. We learn it — or we should — in our own families. We learn it through the friendships we make, and through the communities to which we belong. When adultery betrays the trust of husband or wife, marriage is undermined. Without trust, society is fragmented and it too is ultimately undermined.

There are often good reasons for a probing questioning of the institutions and organisations which make up the fabric of society — whether church, monarchy or ancient corporations. But the acids of perpetual denigration and cynical dismissal can dissolve the things that hold society together.

Betrayal is not often, or usually, a single dramatic act; it is much more likely an insidious erosion. There are warning signs in contemporary society of the death of a culture of trust which we need to heed.

Trust, the dictionary tells us, is the “firm belief in the honesty, veracity, justice or strength of a person or thing”. It is closely related to faith. We cannot prove in an absolute way that a person is to be trusted; we learn that a person is to be trusted by our experience of that person’s trustworthiness or faithfulness.

A scientist has to trust a hypothesis and put it to the test in order to discover its truth. Faith in God is learnt by reaching out in prayer, by risking our lives on his love and testing it to the point of destruction. The faith of Jesus in His Father was so tested in His betrayal, in his being handed over to the political and religious powers of His day, and ultimately in His crying out in agony on the cross in words from the psalms: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

In that cry and in that obedience the Christian faith proclaims that the God with whom we have to do is a God who paradoxically knows what a world without God — and therefore without meaning — is like. He came down to the lowest part of our need.

The beginning of the Passion comes with the moment of betrayal when Judas, one of the inner circle of the Disciples, leads the enemies of Jesus to seize Him in the Garden of Gethsemane, the place where the olives are pressed out — either for gain, or to provoke divine intervention.

Jesus will have known the psalmist’s words that it was “my own familiar friend whom I trusted who has lifted up his hand against me”. But on that night of betrayal Jesus, sitting with His Disciples, took bread and wine.

In breaking and sharing them He identified them as His body and blood, His very life to be shared with them. Communion, which is the very life of the Church, is established in the midst of betrayal, and so it is that whenever and wherever the Church obeys the command of Jesus, to share His life, the Church remembers that it was on the night on which He was betrayed that He said: “You are to go on doing this in remembrance of me.”

His life, then and now, was shared with sinners and not with those who had earned their salvation or achieved their righteousness.

He shares that life with disciples who still betray Him, but always to draw them with the bands of His love into His life and His love, the communion for which we all were made.

The Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe